[open post for real]

[onthewillowsthere]

When the burning stopped he found himself alone. His memory of what happened is hazy -- aren't all his memories hazy? -- but he remembers the light and the fire, the way his hands and mouth were blazing, and even if he didn't remember the scorching on his blue tunic would tell a tale.

He remembers enough.

He can't seem to get warm now, despite the perfectly pleasant climate, and he builds a fire in one of the mansion's many sitting rooms with fireplaces, and then he huddles in front of it, his knees clasped to his chest.

Crowley couldn't make him Galahad again, but he doesn't feel like Damien any more. He remembers enough to know what he had wanted to escape -- whatever purpose it was that made him like this, capable of subsuming into flame or holding a brand-new weapon like a familiar part of his body -- but not enough to know why he's like this, and not enough to be the person Claudius is waiting for. He feels like stone, but a stone that has lost all the earth's heat.

If Crowley, who changed him in the first place, can't change him back, then can he be changed back? It seems to him from what Lan Wangji said that this is all there is now. He's incapable of being loved, incapable of knowing himself, incapable of the lit path that Lan Wangji exhorted him towards.

He stares into the fire, his fixed blue stare that might as well be a stranger's, and wishes he had been rendered in his own bonfire.

Comments

[onthewillowsthere]

"What do you see?" dropping a little shyly from thou.

[wickedwit]

"Mainly red corpsucles ... that's a meaningless word to you. I don’t think it was any more meaningful when it was coined. Mainly red bits that make up blood, the way that a piece of fabric is made of many fine threads." Claudius offers the sleeve of his robe, patterned with subtle purple and gold paisleys, to be touched. “The lenses of a microscope — the device you were examining — magnify the threads, make them appear larger. So instead of seeing a smooth piece of fabric, you see each thread individually, the fraying ends, the chasms in-between them. It’s the same with blood. And my blood is mainly many red bits, but some bits behave very strangely, like ill-suited spies trying to blend in with the rest. At times they’ll toss off their disguises, twist to shapes blood should not, and I’m sure there’s some witchcraft that explains their movements. But after a while, the sample goes inert, as though all the spies went back to sleep.”

[onthewillowsthere]

His fingers sink into the sleeve, rubbing the pattern against his palm. "Is the pain better when your blood rests?"

[wickedwit]

"Yes." Somehow, through the whole explanation, Claudius hadn't mentioned the trivial reality of his pain, or his promise that if the pain started again he'd seek out Lan Wangji directly. It hasn't, not anything like at its original intensity, just enough to confirm the earliest experiments -- and he hasn't felt it again in some time. "But I did note that the oldest samples would stay at rest regardless, which suggests there's a limit to how long they can act outside the body. It gives me an idea of what to attempt when I ask Crowley for help with the cure. I've no wish to grieve thee, if thou wouldst grieve my death ... so I can do little else but try."

[onthewillowsthere]

He is not, truth be told, all that excited about the idea of Claudius being helped by Crowley -- Crowley was certainly not able to help him -- but he's not in a mood to argue with Claudius. He rubs the sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. "Thy pain, too, not only thy death. I would grieve anything that hurt thee."

[wickedwit]

"What a sweet man thou art," he laughs. He lifts a hand to touch the man he thinks of as Galahad's cheek. "Yet I feel the same for thee."

[onthewillowsthere]

He covers Claudius' hand with his bandaged one, which prompts a wince: it still throbs, duller and deeper now. "Thou saidst thou knowest who made me like this-- wilt tell me?"

[wickedwit]

."Of course," Claudius says. He tilts his head back towards the bed. "Come sit with me?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods and lets Claudius' sleeve drop, perhaps reluctantly, and goes to the bed.

[wickedwit]

But as they sit, Claudius draws Galahad to himself, naked skin against lush patterned fabric, so that he can touch his fill.

"You," he says, switching back to the idly formal, "were made by God. Fearfully and wonderfully, as the psalm goes. We all were, but some of us are made as aimless amalgamations of dust and breath, and some of us have purpose. Like the purpose of a sword is to cut, or the purpose of a torch is to burn. You were one of those, I think. You didn't believe you were allowed to live like other people, who stumble through and decide their desires for themselves -- you believed you were something for God to wield. And God is ..." He looks up at the draped canopy and laughs. How to explain? "Our Lord, Our Creator. The one who started all life. And He has rules for how we should live those lives, rules we have to follow to be good. The people who break the rules are called sinners. When they die, the sinners are sent to somewhere called Hell, where they'll suffer for all eternity. The good are redeemed -- because even the good still need redemption -- by being sent to Heaven. That's more or less how it works. What I did to my brother, that's one of the first and worst sins. It's what Cain did to Abel. There was no murder in the world before Cain killed his brother, so we all like to blame him for it. When I was younger, I wondered how Cain even knew what he'd done, if it never happened to anyone before." But he must have known, because he tried to hide it -- Claudius doesn't say it, but he's just the same. If he weren't ashamed, he wouldn't spend his time lying to everyone he knows.

That's hardly relevant here.

"But you weren't a sinner like me. You were still living a terribly strict life where you tried to follow God's rules completely. Because God had a plan and a purpose for you. You were prophesied, you told me. To find the Holy Grail and heal the Fisher King, and I'm afraid I don't know what either of those are -- I don't know why they were worth finding, or needed healing, or why they mattered to you. But that was the plan, and you intended to follow it, and never divert from it. You'd do anything God asked, and even when God was silent, you said it was a test. I think you were afraid of what would become of your life if you'd ever diverted from the path, afraid there was nothing outside it. Or afraid of yourself, and what you wanted. And I was ... genuinely afraid of what would happen, if you'd followed God's plan to the end. People die for God. We call them martyrs, and if you martyred yourself ... I'd grieve you." He grows very quiet. "As I told you, I'd grieve anything that hurt you."

[onthewillowsthere]

While Claudius talks he settles against his side, draping the hem of the robe over his lap so he can stroke it. He's fairly sure he understands... well, nearly none of this, except that God is who crafted him into a shell around a fire, and that his purpose ultimately would have been to die.

At the end he ventures, "If I no longer want that, do you think I am still enough the same for you?"

[wickedwit]

“I’d be relieved, in truth. I wasn’t waiting for you to become the exact same as you once were — no one is. I’m not, or I hope to someone other than God I won’t always be. I hope to change, and not always want the things that destroy me. The loss of your memories is something that changed you, and … you restored what could be restored. Thou art who thou art. Knowing all that thou know’st, dost thou still care for me?”

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods. His own relief is once again palpable; he's more or less incapable of dissembling. His feelings are always writ large on his face.

"I love thee. I understand why thou didst what thou didst. I do not think it-- I cannot say if it was wrong or not. I don't know enough about the world. But I know thee, I know thou wouldst not have done what thou didst not believe in."

[wickedwit]

Claudius can dissemble, does all the time -- but he breathes out his relief and he smiles. "My heart is thine. I cannot swear to be thine alone, but I am thine as long thou wilt have me." He takes this man's, no longer an untouchable saint's, hand in his own and kisses it. "What shall I call thee? To me, thou art my Galahad. But thy name is thine own to decide."

[onthewillowsthere]

"What kind of names do men take for themselves?" He laughs. "I have never named myself before. What is a name for someone who has changed for the better?"

[wickedwit]

"We will search every book and find one thee. But first, thy hand," he says -- and takes the other hand, the bandaged one. "I said my hands are good for more than killing. I can make salves, too if you require them. Will you allow me to take care of you?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He lets it be taken, gone slightly shy again. His hand has already been tended to twice, but there's some new intimacy in letting Claudius see it. At the same time, he feels as if he ought to prepare Claudius in some way for the extent of the burn, as if Claudius hasn't seen worse hurts.

"It's--" He hesitates. He's not really sure what it is/

[wickedwit]

"Here, let me at least see what we're dealing with." He unwraps it carefully, careful of the hand and anywhere it might ache, and careful of the bandaging, too.

[onthewillowsthere]

Nina's bandage is carefully and skillfully wound, the work of someone who knows what she's doing. Under it there's the salve she used, and beneath that the burn itself. Almost all the blisters are broken from a combination of Laertes' efforts to help and his own time spent squeezing or pressing on it, and his hand is swollen and discolored, the skin sloughing away.

[wickedwit]

Claudius was an abysmal soldier in the army, but he was a decent field medic, and assesses the wound with the same careful eye he used to look at his blood through a microscope. It's the calm he needs not to shudder at what's happening to his lover's skin. "Well, now I must insist," he mutters. "You need someone to take care of this, or it won't heal. How did this happen?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He wets his lips uncertainly, but he's told Claudius everything else, and nothing has made him turn away. "I put my hand in the fire so I would know how it felt if I hurt someone else."

[wickedwit]

"Ah." Claudius sighs, and continues to assess. "I suppose that makes some sense. If you thought you were at risk of bursting into flame and had no memories of what flame felt like, you'd want to know how it felt for other people in your path. I can see how that might send you into a state of some panic. And why you were so afraid of hurting me -- you had a fresh memory that was also a discovery, that it's possible to be hurt by fire." It follows, too, why he kept pressing his hand, reminding himself how it hurt so he wouldn't hurt Claudius. To know there was a reason not to come too close. "It won't help if it doesn't heal, though. We'll need to wash this clean before we can rebandage it."

[onthewillowsthere]

Again, that naked relief, the tension easing in his thin face. "All right," in a tone that suggests he would trust Claudius to do very nearly anything to him.

[wickedwit]

"I'll fetch a bowl of water, fresh bandages and salve, and a book for you to start looking for a name from. I don't know if you'll want to look at any of the books my room. Most of them are alchemical books."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Oh-- let me look. I'd like to."